BiTiBi – EU Project to Promote Cycling

BiTiBi is an EU-funded, three year project to promote the intermodal use of bicycles and public transit in urban commuting throughout Europe. BiTiBi is short for Bike-Train-Bike and therefore promoting cycling to and from train stations. The bicycle is a flexible, inexpensive, healthy and quick way to solve first and last-mile commuting difficulties for residents who commute by train over relatively long distances. Intermodality is really the key to address these issues. It is not realistic to expect everyone to bicycle 15km to and from the office, but to cycle 2km each way and hop on the train for the bulk of the trip could dramatically provide countless economic, social and environmental benefits for urban regions. BiTiBi will work with partner municipalities, train operators, bike share schemes and other actors involved in achieving a more energy efficient commute throughout European cities.

Providing BiTiBi services will orient the modal choice of car, car-train and bus-train combination users towards the bicycle-train combination as proven by the Dutch BiTiBi success story. The project will replicate the Dutch proven BiTiBi approach through 4 pilots in United Kingdom (Liverpool area), Belgium (Liège and Ghent), Spain (Barcelona area) and Italy (Milan area).

This will be done via:

• a permanent knowledge exchange between the Dutch experts (NS and inno-V) and the 4 pilots;
• different kinds of (local) stakeholder meetings to help the different decision makers and users understand each other and to optimize the concept;
• communication actions to build confidence and understanding in the market.

The project will last untill 2017. The project partners are 10 partners from Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK. inno-V is responsible for creating the guidelines for succesfull BiTiBi services and supports the partners NS and Merseyrail.

See and share the BiTiBi website for more information and spread the word throughout Europe!

For an impression of the kick-off meeting with all the partners on 26/27th of March 2014, see the storify report below.